1st Grade

How you start your day is often how you live your life. –Louise Hay Beginnings matter. What happens before the first bell even rings has a huge impact on the outcome of the entire day. The tone of the day is established in the first 20 minutes of the day. The effectiveness of the entire…

When Heidi and I were both teaching 2nd grade, we had a dream. We had a dream of THE IDEAL WORD STUDY PROGRAM. We both feel like we had some really solid practices in place for teaching phonics and spelling. But we had complaints about our cobbled together word study program: It never quite seemed…

Hi teacher friends! We wanted to alert you of some upcoming free professional development opportunities that we’re hosting in the coming weeks. You’re invited to join us to learn about Unlocking the Power of Fluency for your students. This is a free, live training we will be offering on a couple of different days. Click…

“Mom wants answers after child with ADHD receives ‘Least Likely to Pay Attention’ award.” That was in my news feed the other day. It’s easy to look at a story like that and think the teacher is incredibly cruel. And though it seems so obvious that this was a terrible, terrible idea, I know exactly how…

There are some common mistakes that teachers make when they embark on teaching oral reading fluency. I’ve made some of these mistakes myself. But we hope to save you from making the same mistakes and have some idea for you of what to do instead. Mistake #1: Using ONLY 1 minute timed readings to assess fluency If…